Many financial and social markets are destroyed by short term opportunism. Because the web is virtually limitless, it is easy to make sales pitches that sound like everyone gains. But that is rarely, if ever, true. Every clean traffic source gets gamed. So do the dirty ones.

A recently launched blog Ponzi Scheme has more holes in it than swiss cheese. What kind of desperate people get in on the 5th tier of a Ponzi Scheme? Does it benefit your credibility to recommend low quality sites or have ads for your site seen on their sites? What type of readers do the low quality sites have, beyond the robotic community? No reason to link out to those sorts of sites, and you can probably use AdSense to buy ad space on their site for about 3 cents a click, if it even has that much value.

The reason many reciprocal link networks stink is that some webmasters marketed low quality sites they intended to get burned. Anything that has you trading with anonymous unknown parties has you trading your time, attention, and exposure with a spambot of some sort. Your site is better than that, and your time is worth more than that.

Many more programs will come out telling you how to get something for free, but if it is market exposure be leery. When I started on the web I did arbitrage on some smaller pay per click search engines and never paid me. Digging deeply for the deals has you focused on bargain hunting when your time would be better spent building value. The deal diggers keep getting made obsolete by increasingly efficient markets. The people creating real value keep making more money as the market gets more efficient.

What I have come to appreciate is that it is easier, cheaper, and more sustainable to associate with the people you want to be grouped with. If you want to link out to a bunch of other sites do it in your content, and hand select the content you reference. I have showed some projects to friends who asked "how the hell did you get X to be involved with this?" I simply asked them. Aim high, not low.

Comments

It's amazing to me that so many people fell for the Blogrush scheme, especially those with brands to protect. I think people forget that they are judged by their users everyday for every pixel that appears on their site. Putting up random links for who-know-what (often get-rich-quick schemes in BlogRush) is not a way to gain the trust of your users.

Your site has sat unnoticed in my feedreader for many many months. I occasionally will drop in to read this or that article, but I rarely find anything to pique my interest here.

It's not that this isn't a well written blog (in fact, it is very well written) but rather, it's because my interests rarely line up with the topics of your post.

This post however, caught my interest. I was delighted to notice you link out to the fantomaster crew and to our good friend over at seo-blackhat.com

Fantomaster's (and your) assessment of Blogrush is right on the money. Im glad to see that not every person carrying the dubious distinction of being an "opinion-maker" in the SEO industry was swayed by this poorly conceived service concept.

I missed your post before voicing that it wont be long before BlogRUSH becomes a BlogHush.

What shocked me about all the hype around BlogRush the most was the fact that there was no innovation. That was apparent from the get go. I'm blown away that so many people fell for it hook, line and sinker.

I'm really glad to see that you are not one of the many who are promoting that program. I could tell from your book that you have some good common sense. It seems that trait has become a rarity. What bothers me even more is that there are so many "respected" bloggers out there who would so willingly endorse something so potentially damaging to their readers.

Kudos to you Aaron!

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